Books

These love stories have other names.
Mothering.
Fathering.
Befriending.
Comforting.
Helping.
And, yes, holding on while letting go.
For loving others is often as much about letting go as holding on—and never too tightly.
If you are looking for a self-help book about caregiving, this isn’t it.
But if you are interested in a thoughtful exploration of...

What do church ladies really think?
Composed and often so quiet as to be thought invisible, church ladies have secret powers to change the world.
What are those special powers?
They love well.
They give well.
They can often cook!
And.... they play an essential role in a great rescue operation for mankind.
For although they appear to have Ninja...

Each Christmas retired chemistry teacher Edwina Bopp makes her newest invention of miracle fudge as a fundraiser for missions in her small Southern town Fountain City.


Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the good lady cooks through the night and then gives the candy away to the fudge-hungry group of people who know this year’s newest recipe is...

Written for school children (4-6 grades), this story of Nat King Cole’s life highlights his impact on the development of music in America and, consequently, the world. He was a distinctive talent in jazz but later became a major voice in pop music.

A sudden plunge off the road. A stranded pulpit committee. And the true meaning of being saved.

Mildred Budge expected a routine church assignment when she joined her congregation’s pulpit committee on a road trip to hear a prospective new preacher. Instead, a sudden turn of the steering wheel sends their car sailing right over a steep...

When the car sailed over the embankment carrying the four members of the pulpit committee, Mildred Budge called out, “Jesus saves.”


The others heard it, but they were also experiencing their own quick flashes of insight.
Liz, a serial widow, felt unsatisfied with her life. She wanted more. Sailing toward her death, she still did.
Sam, who had...

From the author of Lovejoy and Blessed comes a series about church ladies of the South. After reading this first novel in the series, fans of Southern fiction write, “I want to live next door to Mildred Budge.”

A retired school teacher, Mildred Budge just wants to live a quiet life in her hometown of Cloverdale. But retirement does not mean she...

There is a surprising and very freeing future for caregivers after Alzheimer’s disease runs its course and leaves the building where you have been trying to make a home. The house will never be the same. Your heart will never feel the same. But in spite of its bad reputation, living with Al isn’t all about heartbreak.

If you are a current...

I grew up in a family where we wrote one another love letters. We put them on pillows, in lunch bags, by bedsides.
So it was only natural that when my niece Katie asked me to compile some family recipes for her upon the occasion of her marriage that I would place those recipes alongside all the love letters I had been wanting to write and had...

When a church lady falls in love, she falls hard.
Sometimes she lands on her knees.
Miss Budge does as she moves quietly and powerfully through her daily life in Old Cloverdale, where F. Scott Fitzgerald once courted Zelda, and two miles away Nat King Cole was born.
Fitzgerald wrote about love. Nat Cole sang about love, and Mildred Budge knows...

As more and more people are discovering, Alzheimer’s disease is the worst kind of thief. Over time, it robs those who suffer from it of the treasure of their memories and the sharpness of their minds. In “The Long Good Night” Daphne Simpkins chronicles the slow, sometimes heartbreaking decline of her father from the disease, but also contradicts...